Phonebooks were generally only easily available in the area you lived in and not accessable by Vlad in Minsk who wants to collect as much data as he can on you to impersonate you to a bank.
I can't speak to Minsk - but pretty much every library I ever visited in the US back in the day had a huge collection of phonebooks. Generally, one book from each for every community in the county, one for most communities in adjacent counties, one for for every major and medium (and often many smaller) city in the state, and one for every significant city in the US. Not to mention, all Vlad in Minsk had to do was call the phone company and they've very helpfully give him your number unless you'd paid to have it unlisted.
It's good to see Google is able to get patches out this quick.
It was a planned event - and thus Google probably had a team ready to go into action if/when an exploit was found. So, not really all that impressive at all. And it's very doubtful they had time to properly QA the patch given the speed of deployment.
Looks like Google is keeping it's hacker culture alive rather than becoming a slow moving behemoth like their competitors.
Looks more like Google has learned the PR culture well - much like it's competitors. Look around at Google's overall offerings with open eyes, and you'll see the behemoth shambling quite clearly.
Is it me, or is blurring/removing something from these maps the absolute ideal way to tell the entire world: "There's something really important to someone here."
Usually it's not even worth bothering to hide the fact that something important is there, the fences and armed guards are sufficient to that task. (The sub base just a few miles from me has it's own exit off the highway - complete with a standard green highway sign and the name of the base.) The goal is to either avoid revealing what that important something is, or to avoid revealing the details of that something important.
I'm old enough to remember when the predicted dytopia in 15 years (or less) in 1972. And 1979. And 1984. And 1987. And 1991. And... well, you get the picture.
It's hard to look at these numbers and not see that internet radio
is just like regular radio - a very, very small number make the very big bucks. A not very much larger number make the big bucks. Most make a pittance.
I grew up in a semi-rural area so I know what I'm talkin bout here:
No, really you don't.
Figure out why your neighbors hate you and convince them to like you. Lets be realistic, middle of nowhere, nobody's driving 500 miles just to dump on your land... You pissed someone off who lives VERY nearby and the folks who could bust him are better friends with him than you. Fix that.
Neighbors don't generally have as much to dump of the type of materials he describes... and they generally dump garbage since that's what they *do* have ongoing quantities of.
And the "middle of nowhere 500 miles" is an invention of your own mind... I've lived in half a dozen places in the US where areas like he describes (semi-remote, off the grid cabins) can be found only five or ten miles (at most) outside of town - and people *will* drive that distance to dump. The place I own part of, and which we have clean up a couple of times a year, seems pretty remote when you're standing there... but it's only three miles outside of town and a mile off of a busy state highway and a quarter mile past the (thinly) built up area. (We suspect it's a dumping ground because unlike the places closer to the main road, the driveway is behind a curve.)
Another thing I don't understand
There's much you don't understand grasshopper. That leads you to confuse assumptions with facts.
Actually I can - if you read what I wrote and are actually familiar with the Challenger accident and the history behind it rather than just parroting the soundbite version.
Short version: The primary O-ring leaked fairly consistently even at temperatures within the design limits. (Contrary to popular belief, there were not actual specs or hold/abort limits based on O-ring temperature. Just design limits that were never fully formalized into flight criteria.) So, they added a secondary O-ring, and once they started flying... it too showed signs of damage and near failure even at temperatures within the design limits. But it never actually failed - so they declared it safe to fly... With results known to all.
The moral of the story is that if you rely on a backup - you essentially don't have a backup, and have reduced your defenses from two lines to one.
Or, even more likely (especially given the data from known civilian attempts) and as with so many other projects of the era... the damn thing simply didn't work.
Bear in mind why this was built. Nobody knew what a supersonic aircraft needed to look like, so lots of things were tried. The opposite extreme from the Avrocar was the X-3 Stilleto, probably the pointiest-nose aircraft ever built. It flew, but couldn't go supersonic.
If you actually read the link you provide - you'll find that it's failure to go supersonic wasn't aerodynamics, it was lack of engine performance.
Flying wings were tried - they had stability problems not solveable with 1950s technology.
Flying wings were not tried in supersonic flight.
Finally, it was figured out that swept-back wings could be made to behave at both subsonic and supersonic speeds, and that became the standard form for supersonic aircraft.
Never mind all the straight winged aircraft that behaved just fine in both the subsonic and supersonic regimes...
The engine failure of the falcon 9 engine #1 is not really a bad thing. It served to prove the reliability of the shutoff system, and flight control hardware.
The numerous failures of the primary O-ring on the SRB's "proved" the reliability of the backup O-ring too. The numerous near (but not complete) failures of the back-up O-ring "proved" it was reliable too.
Sounds like it did exactly what it was supposed to do.
Airbags, when they inflate, and save you from injury in an accident, are doing what they're designed to as well. As is the life jacket that keeps you afloat when you fall overboard. I don't think anyone sane would regard the root cause of their function according to design as anything but a problem. This is the same case, something went very wrong causing an engine to do what it's *not* designed to do - shut itself down in flight. Given the very limited number of these engines that have flown to date, this is something to be very concerned about. By any engineering standards (even the loose ones of space flight which let you call a single flight "proof"), a 1 in (IIRC) thirty failure rate is a Very Big Problem indeed.
Or to put it another way - the backup SRB field joint O-ring worked as designed and captured the leakage past the primary O-ring... right up until the day it didn't.
Everyone is missing the point here... despite massive greenwashing, the NIF really has nothing to do with fusion power. It's meant to study the processes that produce fusion in nuclear weapons.
Though I'd been exposed to them here and there, I wasn't really formally taught much of anything about computers in high school. My first real hands on with a computer (other than diddling with the TRS-80 on display down at the Radio Shack in Hanes Mall) was a (IIRC) four bit trainer in SWSEA (a Navy school) in the summer of '82.
As far as thermal control and communications, etc., are concerned, remember that there is over 54 years of experience with spin-stabilized spacecraft.
I really need to point out to you that the Apollo barbeque mode was only 1RPM or so? That almost none of the spun stabilized spacecraft have spun fast enough to produce more than a few hundredths of a G? That all of the spun stabilized spacecraft to date have consisted of single spacecraft, not tethered? (Which means, among other things, that they were weren't flexible even when the couldn't mount their propulsion systems at the center of spin.) Etc... etc...
The things you are worried about have solutions dating from decades ago.
Um, no. They don't. You haven't the foggiest clue what you're talking about.
It will solve a lot more problems than the relatively minor one of dealing with in-space surgery.
Tethering also *introduces* a lot of problems too. Now the systems need to work at zero-G as well as whatever G load in induced by the tether. Mobility within the spacecraft equally becomes difficult for the same reasons. Making course correction burns becomes infinitely more difficult as you need to exit the tethered and rotating state, perform the burn, and re-tether and spin up. (Also adding multiple failure modes to the process.) Thermal control becomes more difficult since pointing control becomes astronomically more difficult. (Which also effects communications as well.)
tl;dr version: Tethering is difficult and adds more problems than you might think - it's no panacea. TANSTAAFL.
What also makes it a big deal is the source... Space.com - a website dedicated to space news. They're no different than any other news site in that they have to generate new content on a regular basis, and manned space, commercial space, and potential disasters are all great hit count generators. All three together make an irresistible trifecta.
Dude, I'd like to understand your argument, but so far you haven't presented one. Which suggests to me that you don't really have one.
When someone points at a fish and calls it a bicycle - there's no argument to present because that person is so disconnected from the language everyone else is using.
(Hint: Networking is generally considered to be linking individual nodes to other arbitrary individual nodes.)
Try educating yourself, the Wikipedia article on Social Networking would be a good start.
You're going to put a giant, top-opening cargo hold in a submarine?
I'm a former submariner, and trying to maneuver something underwater like that giant cargo hold gives me the squirming heebie-jeebies. Depth control would be somewhat... interesting. (To put it mildly.)
Social networking is no longer new; whether you consider it to have started with online communities in the mid-90s or with the beginnings of sites many people still use today.
I consider it to have started with Usenet.
Then, like the individual about touting listserv, you're using a definition of "social networking" so radically different from the one in common use... that you might as well be discussing the best method of making yak butter tea in Pantagonia.
For three reasons: First, because users demand it and your system/ecosystem is much less desirable without it. Second, because you can use it for advertising. Third, because you can use it as a loss leader for your other paid products...
That's just off the top of my head, there's probably more.
When I read the following, I started to think the author might not be quite connected with reality:
Why else have 400 million people signed up for Google+, almost half as many as are on Facebook?
Failing to account for the vast disparity between signups and activity is a serious flaw in his argument - especially when he charges to growth to "marketing"... rather than the forced conversion and signups from people who already had Google accounts and those who obtained them via Android phones. (He does mention, dismissively, the lack of staying power later... and the lets this critical issue drop.)
But when I read this the following, I really should have stopped as he's clearly headed off into cloud cuckoo land.
So imagine if, at the same time that Google had released Google+, they had also released an open source server package that anybody could use to set up their own Google+ node, completely interoperable with all Google-hosted accounts, and where the user could have complete control over their hosted content.
But they didn't. And there isn't going to be a decentralized social networking system that allows access to anything resembling Google's ecosystem. He also claims that most people won't switch because of an analysis of the value of distributed v. centralized - but then sets up and knocks down a set of strawmen that require potential users to to make such an analysis.
In sum, I don't think of the objections raised are fatal to the whole concept, although some of the objections made me think of improvements to the original idea (e.g. an API to build games and apps that could communicate over the Internet with other installations of the same app
I'll just put this bluntly - if don't know enough to think of a game or apps API, or how users interact using them... You shouldn't be answering objections about a social networking system, because such interactions are part and parcel of social networking.
I mean hell, I can't get over the fact that I can see detailed images of Mars from the comfort of my own living room. If someone had told me that when I was a kid, I would never have believed it.
Just out of curiosity (if you'll pardon the pun), just how much older than sixty (being charitable) are you? Because such things have clearly been coming since the first blurry images from Viking popped up on the boob tube in the comfort of my parent's living room back in the seventies when *I* was a kid.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't speak to Minsk - but pretty much every library I ever visited in the US back in the day had a huge collection of phonebooks. Generally, one book from each for every community in the county, one for most communities in adjacent counties, one for for every major and medium (and often many smaller) city in the state, and one for every significant city in the US. Not to mention, all Vlad in Minsk had to do was call the phone company and they've very helpfully give him your number unless you'd paid to have it unlisted.
It was a planned event - and thus Google probably had a team ready to go into action if/when an exploit was found. So, not really all that impressive at all. And it's very doubtful they had time to properly QA the patch given the speed of deployment.
Looks more like Google has learned the PR culture well - much like it's competitors. Look around at Google's overall offerings with open eyes, and you'll see the behemoth shambling quite clearly.
Usually it's not even worth bothering to hide the fact that something important is there, the fences and armed guards are sufficient to that task. (The sub base just a few miles from me has it's own exit off the highway - complete with a standard green highway sign and the name of the base.) The goal is to either avoid revealing what that important something is, or to avoid revealing the details of that something important.
I'm old enough to remember when the predicted dytopia in 15 years (or less) in 1972. And 1979. And 1984. And 1987. And 1991. And... well, you get the picture.
Obvious and ignorant comment is obvious and ignorant.
is just like regular radio - a very, very small number make the very big bucks. A not very much larger number make the big bucks. Most make a pittance.
No, really you don't.
Neighbors don't generally have as much to dump of the type of materials he describes... and they generally dump garbage since that's what they *do* have ongoing quantities of.
And the "middle of nowhere 500 miles" is an invention of your own mind... I've lived in half a dozen places in the US where areas like he describes (semi-remote, off the grid cabins) can be found only five or ten miles (at most) outside of town - and people *will* drive that distance to dump. The place I own part of, and which we have clean up a couple of times a year, seems pretty remote when you're standing there... but it's only three miles outside of town and a mile off of a busy state highway and a quarter mile past the (thinly) built up area. (We suspect it's a dumping ground because unlike the places closer to the main road, the driveway is behind a curve.)
There's much you don't understand grasshopper. That leads you to confuse assumptions with facts.
Actually I can - if you read what I wrote and are actually familiar with the Challenger accident and the history behind it rather than just parroting the soundbite version.
Short version: The primary O-ring leaked fairly consistently even at temperatures within the design limits. (Contrary to popular belief, there were not actual specs or hold/abort limits based on O-ring temperature. Just design limits that were never fully formalized into flight criteria.) So, they added a secondary O-ring, and once they started flying... it too showed signs of damage and near failure even at temperatures within the design limits. But it never actually failed - so they declared it safe to fly... With results known to all.
The moral of the story is that if you rely on a backup - you essentially don't have a backup, and have reduced your defenses from two lines to one.
Or, even more likely (especially given the data from known civilian attempts) and as with so many other projects of the era... the damn thing simply didn't work.
If you actually read the link you provide - you'll find that it's failure to go supersonic wasn't aerodynamics, it was lack of engine performance.
Flying wings were not tried in supersonic flight.
Never mind all the straight winged aircraft that behaved just fine in both the subsonic and supersonic regimes...
The numerous failures of the primary O-ring on the SRB's "proved" the reliability of the backup O-ring too. The numerous near (but not complete) failures of the back-up O-ring "proved" it was reliable too.
Right up until the 25th time...
Airbags, when they inflate, and save you from injury in an accident, are doing what they're designed to as well. As is the life jacket that keeps you afloat when you fall overboard. I don't think anyone sane would regard the root cause of their function according to design as anything but a problem. This is the same case, something went very wrong causing an engine to do what it's *not* designed to do - shut itself down in flight. Given the very limited number of these engines that have flown to date, this is something to be very concerned about. By any engineering standards (even the loose ones of space flight which let you call a single flight "proof"), a 1 in (IIRC) thirty failure rate is a Very Big Problem indeed.
Or to put it another way - the backup SRB field joint O-ring worked as designed and captured the leakage past the primary O-ring... right up until the day it didn't.
It's never good to rely on a backup system.
Everyone is missing the point here... despite massive greenwashing, the NIF really has nothing to do with fusion power. It's meant to study the processes that produce fusion in nuclear weapons.
Because it's an opportunity for the hourly Two Minute Hate.
Class of '81 (Go Vikings!).
Though I'd been exposed to them here and there, I wasn't really formally taught much of anything about computers in high school. My first real hands on with a computer (other than diddling with the TRS-80 on display down at the Radio Shack in Hanes Mall) was a (IIRC) four bit trainer in SWSEA (a Navy school) in the summer of '82.
I really need to point out to you that the Apollo barbeque mode was only 1RPM or so? That almost none of the spun stabilized spacecraft have spun fast enough to produce more than a few hundredths of a G? That all of the spun stabilized spacecraft to date have consisted of single spacecraft, not tethered? (Which means, among other things, that they were weren't flexible even when the couldn't mount their propulsion systems at the center of spin.) Etc... etc...
Um, no. They don't. You haven't the foggiest clue what you're talking about.
Tethering also *introduces* a lot of problems too. Now the systems need to work at zero-G as well as whatever G load in induced by the tether. Mobility within the spacecraft equally becomes difficult for the same reasons. Making course correction burns becomes infinitely more difficult as you need to exit the tethered and rotating state, perform the burn, and re-tether and spin up. (Also adding multiple failure modes to the process.) Thermal control becomes more difficult since pointing control becomes astronomically more difficult. (Which also effects communications as well.)
tl;dr version: Tethering is difficult and adds more problems than you might think - it's no panacea. TANSTAAFL.
What also makes it a big deal is the source... Space.com - a website dedicated to space news. They're no different than any other news site in that they have to generate new content on a regular basis, and manned space, commercial space, and potential disasters are all great hit count generators. All three together make an irresistible trifecta.
I can't figure out, absent my tinfoil hat, which candidate has that much power.
When someone points at a fish and calls it a bicycle - there's no argument to present because that person is so disconnected from the language everyone else is using.
(Hint: Networking is generally considered to be linking individual nodes to other arbitrary individual nodes.)
Try educating yourself, the Wikipedia article on Social Networking would be a good start.
I'm a former submariner, and trying to maneuver something underwater like that giant cargo hold gives me the squirming heebie-jeebies. Depth control would be somewhat... interesting. (To put it mildly.)
Then, like the individual about touting listserv, you're using a definition of "social networking" so radically different from the one in common use... that you might as well be discussing the best method of making yak butter tea in Pantagonia.
For three reasons: First, because users demand it and your system/ecosystem is much less desirable without it. Second, because you can use it for advertising. Third, because you can use it as a loss leader for your other paid products...
That's just off the top of my head, there's probably more.
When I read the following, I started to think the author might not be quite connected with reality:
Failing to account for the vast disparity between signups and activity is a serious flaw in his argument - especially when he charges to growth to "marketing"... rather than the forced conversion and signups from people who already had Google accounts and those who obtained them via Android phones. (He does mention, dismissively, the lack of staying power later... and the lets this critical issue drop.)
But when I read this the following, I really should have stopped as he's clearly headed off into cloud cuckoo land.
But they didn't. And there isn't going to be a decentralized social networking system that allows access to anything resembling Google's ecosystem. He also claims that most people won't switch because of an analysis of the value of distributed v. centralized - but then sets up and knocks down a set of strawmen that require potential users to to make such an analysis.
I'll just put this bluntly - if don't know enough to think of a game or apps API, or how users interact using them... You shouldn't be answering objections about a social networking system, because such interactions are part and parcel of social networking.
Just out of curiosity (if you'll pardon the pun), just how much older than sixty (being charitable) are you? Because such things have clearly been coming since the first blurry images from Viking popped up on the boob tube in the comfort of my parent's living room back in the seventies when *I* was a kid.